found_drama

April through June: gone as quick as they came. Shall we check in on the goals I set for myself? I think we shall.

1. Write at least three hours per week. To echo my sentiments from last quarter: not a banner year. I have hardly scratched out a few incoherent words let alone incoherent sentences.  The long litany of excuses only grows but the conclusion remains the same:  I am not forcing myself to sit down and do this.  But maybe the fact that the word “force” even enters the equation is proof enough that ‘09 is not “my” year?  We shall see.  If ‘07 is any indication of how a year can swing around dramatically…
   
2. Read 36 new books during 2009. Still a bit behind the target pace but picking up steam:
   
   Tracking the ‘09 reading list on Goodreads.com with the  ”2009” tag/bookshelf¹.  Also exciting is that I’ve read most of the books from my specific hit list for the year:
   
   Remaining on that list:  An Obedient Father, Dhalgren, Foucault’s Pendulum, Theodore Rex (Modern Library Paperbacks), and Nights at the Circus².
3. Walk at least 10 miles every week. I have on and off days…
   
   …though apparently most off days³?  And now that we’re moving out to Essex, I fear this may drop a bit more.
4. Climb at least once each week. Doing just fine here, thanks:
   
5. Finish up my Ortho theme for WordPress. Been done.
6. Get outside more often. Uh…?  It’s Spring/Summer time now.  Thanks for asking.  See you out there…

At the year’s half-way mark, where shall we say I have landed?

1. Mind your step though.  It’s a bit clutted with kids books that don’t really count. [↩]
2. These links head out to Amazon.com Affiliate links, BTW.  In case you wanted to help a guy out. [↩]
3. Note: technically speaking, I made this graph with a few days to spare left in June.  So I might still have eeked out just enough mileage?  The Q3 round-up should have some more official numbers. [↩]

• Hands on with the Opera 10 Web browser beta
  at Macworld (via DF) — posting waaay after the fact but: I love what they've done with the tab bar.
  (tagged: opera browsers ui todo )
• The Big Idea: Seth Shostak
  at Whatever
  (tagged: science space astronomy culture society exobiology research todo )
• China Mieville on Lovecraft: A Favorite(?) New York Story
  at Omnivoracious
  (tagged: literature scifi horror video todo )
• @font-face: The Potential of Web Typography
  Neat and lovely. Though sadly the coolest stuff is probably the least likely to catch on at all quickly. Also: this crashed Safari the first time I tried to load up the page. (ha?)
  (tagged: webdev design css typography html5 Firefox safari )
• Fairmount: Convert Your DVD Collection
  (tagged: software freeware DVD movies todo )
• DM of the Rings I:The Copious Backstory
  at Twenty Sided (via B²) — pretty funny (reminds me of that video short "Summoner Geeks" from… oh ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO?)
  (tagged: blog literature geek art humor comic fantasy fun parody )
• Friday Favorite: Scrivener
  at TUAW — this will be my 3rd mention of Scrivener in as many years. Maybe this time I'll actually try it?
  (tagged: writing Mac software todo )
• Paparazzi!
  For screenshots. Of like whole web pages and not just "the part you can see". Nice.
  (tagged: webdev design Mac OSX software screenshot )

• Fifty Books for Our Times
  at Newsweek.com — actually not a bad looking list
  (tagged: todo literature fiction history culture )
• There, I Fixed It.
  Dumb? or "ZOMG so true!"?
  (tagged: blog hack creativity humor fun )
• The Happiness Project Toolbox
  via A. — indeed: intriguing
  (tagged: blog lifehacks productivity GTD goals inspiration )
• Abandoned Places In The World
  via damnthatscool.com — I feel like I've seen this list before but it's worth a re-link if I have. Cool stuff here.
  (tagged: apocalypse architecture art research )
• The Giant Pyramids of North Dakota
  at Atlas Obscura (via B²)
  (tagged: research surreal )

Re my own writing:  this is kind of vindicating and kind of disheartening:

A friend asked me today:  ”On IM, when you type ‘haha’, does that imply that you actually laughed?”

I answered immediately:  no.

The “haha” and “hehe” strings imply that you got the joke, that you’re reading and comprehending the humor, that you believe the preceding statement is funny — but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you laughed.

Leading to the follow-up:  ”What about ‘LOL’?”

Which, naturally, means that you did in fact laugh out loud.  ”LOL” is a step up from a “hehe” or a “haha”.  It ought to be a rare and coveted event.  If you can eek out an LOL from someone, you’ve done well.

This led to a couple of brief asides about the hierarchy of online laughter:

Observe:  First the “heh” is a modicum of laughter; the online equivalent of the wry smile or the eye-roll at some lame pun.  ”Heh” says:  I get it but you’ll need to do better. Then there are the siblings “haha” and “hehe”.  Both are a bit ambiguous since either could be a polite gesture (I like you and that was funny but not LOL-worthy) or an indication of genuine amusement.  Neither should be taken as offensive but neither should be interpreted as full-on actual laughter.  Next are the bastard cousins “muwahaha” and “bwahaha”.  ”Muwahaha” is the evil one — that’s reserved for when you’re laughing at someone’s expense.  ”Bwahaha” is a more uncontrollable laughter — the online equivalent of shooting milk out your nose.  But nothing can compare to the rate and coveted “LOL”:  laughing-out-loud is when you have arrived and caused someone to physically make an ass out of him or herself by laughing at your disembodied wit.

Everything else is just derivative.

Arranged chronologically from 1955 through 2001, Dozois’ anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming, is a tightly-themed collection of science fiction shorts. It’s a good overview of the terraforming subject’s treatment within the genre but the anthology seems to lack any stand-out stories — there are no great masterpieces in here. Which is not to say that it’s not an enjoyable collection. I mostly picked it up for research purposes (re terraforming and first contact¹) but found it to be a good bed-side item. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this collection is that, because it is arranged chronologically, you get a sense of how views of terraforming have evolved within the genre over time — what are the in vogue technologies? how central is terraforming to the story? what sorts of politics are involved?

As for the computed average of my ratings on the individual stories themselves (out to four decimal places), Worldmakers scores: 3.2250

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Though there’s barely any first-contact subject matter in here at all. [↩]

descend from Andes
descend to utter madness
wrestle with monkeys

Great film.  Stunning.  Epic.  Masterfully shot.  Surreal.  Insert more superlatives here.

However, when your primary film-selection criterion for the evening is “which one is shortest?” — well, this one may leave your jaw unpleasantly unhinged.  Bewildering.

Will watch again.  When I’m more serious about it.

A day late here but what the hell… Happy birthday, Holden.

Above? That’s a mosaic of his one-per-day portraits for the first year. It begins June 22, 2008 and goes through June 22, 2009. We managed to only miss one day through the whole mess, too.

• 5.5. Case study: Dumb Quotes
  via lepht (at [Dive Into Greasemonkey])
  (tagged: webdev javascript regex todo )
• Repeat after me: Unicode is not UTF-\d{1,2}
  via lepht (via reddit.com): short version:
  

  Unicode is a standard, and UTF-(8|16|32) are character encodings that support encoding Unicode data into byte strings.

  (tagged: Unicode text dev essay todo )
• Modeling the Mobile User Experience
  (tagged: design usability prototype ux todo work )
• Lex Machina Print Sale
  at Warren Ellis — these look pretty bad ass
  (tagged: art shopping todo )
• A Detailed Look at the Z-Index CSS Property
  at Impressive Webs — always worth a refresher
  (tagged: css webdev z-index )